Still not convinced? Take it from one of our own clients, Selectequip:

When they made the move from Sage to Cin7, they cut out as many paper-based processes as they could.

And once they had everything linked up digitally, they were able to transform a 7-day delivery timeframe into an overnight one – they were able to process and dispatch their orders in a matter of hours, rather than days.

2. Re-work your warehouse layout

Cutting down on physical paper is great.

But you can’t get around the fact that your warehouse runs in a physical space.

That means you need to do everything you can to make the physical aspects of your business as efficient as possible (things like receiving, storing, picking and packing your goods).

So how can you improve the physical space your warehouse operates in? You can start by:

Allocating more space to your receiving section, giving your workers the space they need to inspect, organise and label new goods – and helping to avoid any domino-effect errors later on

Storing fast-moving items close to where they’re needed – so your pickers don’t have to constantly hike across your warehouse for the most common items in demand

Storing closely connected items near to each other – if certain materials or products are often sold as a package, don’t make your pickers do a full circuit of your warehouse just to get both

Creating shortcuts – instead of arranging your warehouse like a set of supermarket aisles, go for a city-block approach: give your pickers the chance to move in all directions when they need to.

By giving your warehouse managers instant access to your sales reports and incoming delivery data, they’ll be able to make informed decisions about which products sell the fastest – and which ones are often sold together.

Which brings us nicely onto our next point:

3. Use every bit of data you can

We all know that knowledge is power.

But what lots of businesses don’t seem to realise is this:

Knowledge is money, too.

With the right digital tools behind you, you’ll have access to the kinds of deep reporting and insightful data that can make your warehouse run more smoothly – and make any cost-cutting opportunities painfully obvious.

4. Invest in the right gadgets

But a few choice investments in the right tech can make a massive difference. You could try looking into:

Thermal printers for creating barcode labels on the fly (An app like Cin7 can be linked up to your printers to handle the code generation)

RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) tags – RFID readers can read up to 200 tags at once (and at range!) which can take a huge chunk out of the time it takes to track stock

Multiple mobile devices – when you have several handheld scanners and readers all connected through Bluetooth and the cloud, you can have an entire team doing the same stock take or audit at once, in a fraction of the time.